This is a very interesting post! One quick and very small technical detail: Rethink Priorities’ welfare ranges aren’t capped at 1 for non-human animals. (It just happens that, when we adjusted for probability of sentience, they all happened to have 50th percentile estimates that fall below 1). They’re instead a reflection of the difference between the best and worst states that the non-human animal can experience relative to the difference between the best and worst states that a human can experience (which is normalized to 1). In theory, this relative difference could be greater than 1 if the range in intensity of experiences that a non-human animal can experience is wider than that of humans.
“In fact, one of our welfare range models (the undiluted experiences mode) that feeds into the aggregate estimates tends to produce sentience-adjusted welfare range estimates greater than 1 under the theory that less cognitively complex organisms may not be able to dampen negative experiences by contextualizing them.” → I’m not sure if this is correct. I’d think that the welfare range remains equally large if someone’s ‘suffering dampening capacity’ increases. That dampening capacity is like a painkiller, but someone who has more access to painkillers does not have a smaller pain range. If a person simply decides not to take a painkiller, or not to dampen suffering, that person’s suffering remains large. Furthermore, this dampening capacity argument violates the valence symmetry assumption, unless someone with a large suffering dampening capacity also has a large happiness dampening capacity and cannot help but to dampen his happiness just like he cannot help but to dampen his suffering. But why would a person dampen happiness?
Hi Kyle,
This is a very interesting post! One quick and very small technical detail: Rethink Priorities’ welfare ranges aren’t capped at 1 for non-human animals. (It just happens that, when we adjusted for probability of sentience, they all happened to have 50th percentile estimates that fall below 1). They’re instead a reflection of the difference between the best and worst states that the non-human animal can experience relative to the difference between the best and worst states that a human can experience (which is normalized to 1). In theory, this relative difference could be greater than 1 if the range in intensity of experiences that a non-human animal can experience is wider than that of humans.
In fact, one of our welfare range models (the undiluted experiences mode) that feeds into the aggregate estimates tends to produce sentience-adjusted welfare range estimates greater than 1 under the theory that less cognitively complex organisms may not be able to dampen negative experiences by contextualizing them. As such, a few animals have 95th percentile estimates for their welfare ranges that are above 1 (octopuses, pigs, and shrimp). Here are some more details about the models and distributions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xUvMKRkEOJQcc6V7VJqcLLGAJ2SsdZno0jTIUb61D8k/edit?usp=sharing As well as the spreadsheet of results from all models: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SpbrcfmBoC50PTxlizF5HzBIq4p-17m3JduYXZCH2Og/edit?usp=sharing
Again, this is a really thought-provoking and sobering post, thanks for writing it :)
Thank you for flagging this, Laura! I’ve edited the definition to correct the misstatement.
Hi Laura
“In fact, one of our welfare range models (the undiluted experiences mode) that feeds into the aggregate estimates tends to produce sentience-adjusted welfare range estimates greater than 1 under the theory that less cognitively complex organisms may not be able to dampen negative experiences by contextualizing them.” → I’m not sure if this is correct. I’d think that the welfare range remains equally large if someone’s ‘suffering dampening capacity’ increases. That dampening capacity is like a painkiller, but someone who has more access to painkillers does not have a smaller pain range. If a person simply decides not to take a painkiller, or not to dampen suffering, that person’s suffering remains large. Furthermore, this dampening capacity argument violates the valence symmetry assumption, unless someone with a large suffering dampening capacity also has a large happiness dampening capacity and cannot help but to dampen his happiness just like he cannot help but to dampen his suffering. But why would a person dampen happiness?